Senior Associate, External Engagement

SPEND - Senior Associate, External Engagement Strategic Public Education National Data (SPEND) Initiative Senior Associate, External Engagement

Location: Remote (U.S.

-based required)

About the SPEND Initiative

Accurate and comparable education finance data is the essential foundation for effective governance and robust research. The Strategic Public Education National Data (SPEND) Initiative is a non-partisan organization and a fiscally sponsored project of Education Resource Strategies (ERS). Our mission is to maintain and modernize the technical pipeline that improves the accuracy, comparability, and timeliness of education finance data. We aim to provide a stable, objective data foundation—a modern data utility that serves the needs of researchers, state and district leaders, and the broader education field.

• Make Your Mark on a Growing Organization:
  You’ll join SPEND early enough to influence how we work, not just execute within systems someone else designed. You will introduce ideas, improve processes, build new approaches, and see your work become part of how the organization operates.
• Shape How SPEND Reaches the Field:
  Sharing our work with the field is central to SPEND’s mission. We are looking for someone who brings judgment about audiences, content, channels, and discoverability—and who is comfortable both with recommending what we should do and ensuring follow-through on key activities.
• Work on a Problem That Matters:
  Education finance data infrastructure is fragmented, inconsistent, and ND exists to fix that—and this role is how we make sure the right people know it. You’ll have a direct hand in how the field perceives and engages with one of the most consequential data challenges in public education.
• Learn From and With Our Team:
  You'll work closely with colleagues who are developing data resources, engaging researchers and policymakers, and thinking through emerging questions in the field. You don’t need to arrive knowing education finance, but you should be curious enough to ask good questions, understand what matters, spot opportunities, and make sound decisions about how SPEND communicates and engages with the field.
• Enjoy Real Variety in Your Work:
  If you like jobs with clearly bounded lanes, this probably isn’t one of them. If you enjoy writing and editing, thinking about audiences, improving systems, preparing a convening, solving unexpected problems, and learning something new along the way, you may find the variety exceptionally rewarding.
• Join a Mission-Focused Team with Institutional Stability: Contribute as a foundational member of a new initiative supported by a multi-year general operating grant and the established operational infrastructure of ERS.

We are seeking a Senior Associate, External Engagement to help make SPEND’s technical work understandable, accessible, discoverable, and useful to the people who can benefit from it.

This is a mid-level, individual contributor role for someone who is skilled at translating substantive, technical, data, or research-based work for external audiences and thinking strategically about how that work reaches the field. SPEND is not selling a product or advancing an advocacy agenda. Our external communications are grounded in technical expertise and objectivity, with the goal of helping researchers, policymakers, state and district leaders, and other audiences find, understand, and use SPEND’s work.

As SPEND’s primary knowledge translation professional, you will have significant ownership of day-to-day external content, dissemination, and audience engagement. You will work closely with colleagues across the organization to understand complex ideas, determine what matters for different audiences,…